The Boston Globe Magazine had a pretty good piece on them a few years back. It was far easier to read in print, but I think this the article:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/2011/0807/

Most of the R&D went into the cups themselves. Simple as they seem, it appears the company went through a lot of iterations to get the right gas mixture and volume right to have fresh coffee with long shelf-life.

if by right gas mixture you mean 100% nitrogen, it's inert, and is used in tires and bags of chips. When the bags of chips are opened, however, the other special ingredient 'crisp' that they put in escapes

That's not what I meant.

what else would they use? it's perfectly inert, there's nothing to engineer. Traditionally coffee is vacuum packed, but nitrogen works fine too

IE, you got marketed to. That's fine, I'm just saying, I don't think they did something new

Direct link: http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2011/08/07/the_insid...

EDIT: single page.

Thanks for the direct link. I probably should have discovered that was an option.